NEW MUSIC; New Albums From Estelle, Lambchop and Matthew Shipp Trio

By JON CARAMANICA, BEN RATLIFF and NATE CHINEN

Published: February 28, 2012

ESTELLE

''All of Me''

(Home School/Atlantic)

The series of skits that weave through ''All of Me,'' the third Estelle album, involve a loose, wide-ranging conversation among several friends about relationships, education, family, careers and more. Even with the light soul-jazz in the background (produced in part by Questlove of the Roots), they have the feeling of intimate home recordings, modest and almost accidental.

It's an odd conceit on which to hang any album, much less one by a versatile and very polished singer and rapper. But it's maybe the right move for this comfortable, small and sometimes vague album. If ''All of Me'' is about any one thing, it's acceptance, though it takes some time to arrive at that conclusion. The album closes with a pair of uplift-themed songs that recall the neo-soul of a decade or so ago.

And sure, these are unfashionable choices, ones that have very little to do with the rest of contemporary R&B. And if she stuck close to them, it would be notable. Estelle recalls the young Lauryn Hill at times: the gentle, loping ''Thank You'' is clear homage, and on ''Speak Ya Mind,'' Estelle sings, ''I just want them to pull out 'The Miseducation' again,'' referring to Ms. Hill's debut. But the remainder of this album finds Estelle trying on familiar poses, or unfamiliar ones that vex.

The clunky, apocalyptic ''International (Serious)'' finds her dipping into patois, while the guests Chris Brown and Trey Songz get to dabble in rapping -- it's centerless. But soon after that comes ''Break My Heart,'' a slinky collaboration with Rick Ross that could have come from any of Mr. Ross's recent albums.

Neither shows Estelle's true potential. The song that comes closest to doing so, ''Cold Crush,'' finds Estelle trying on another role, but one she happens to be extremely comfortable with. ''Cold Crush'' is a delicious slice of 1983-style R&B, all drum-machine snares and synthetic guitars. But it's never cold. That's because Estelle sighs all over it, her voice given full spread to be sultry and a bit naughty. It's not the style she was born with, but it'll have to do. JON CARAMANICA

LAMBCHOP

''Mr. M'' (Merge)

For 20 years the Nashville band Lambchop has pleaded nolo contendere. It started out as a kind of indie-rock -- something to do with keeping things small, textured, weird, backhanded, out of fashion -- but never sounded as if it were competing in the usual way. Instead of figuring new ways to resist and challenge, Lambchop steadily made its music more beautiful.

At the middle of Lambchop's sound is Kurt Wagner's finger-picked guitar and light baritone voice, throwing out trembling, tidy words like pebbles in a lake, in phrases that cut on the line between bitter and hopeful, intimate and absurd. And around that, many variables.

In the past they might have been horns or woodwinds or steel guitar. On ''Mr. M,'' Lambchop's 11th record, the surroundings are often strings, arranged by Mason Neely and Peter Stopschinski, in lurking backgrounds or articulate foregrounds.

Those foregrounds become interludes, or full-blown alternate routes, like the second half of ''Gone Tomorrow,'' in which string phrases rise and melt into other aspects of sound: echoed tones, tiny rising and falling analog buzzes, a rhythm-section vamp, small applications of piano.

A lot of the songs are about long-term love or regret, but Mr. Wagner's lyrics will often throw you: in the song ''Mr. Met,'' a couplet like ''Fear makes us critical/knowledge is difficult'' is soon followed by ''Sleep made you possible/'Dude' made this laughable,'' whatever that means.

Slow and easeful, its songs built episodically, ''Mr. M'' -- dedicated to Vic Chesnutt, the Georgia singer-songwriter who died in 2009, a friend of the band's -- depends on the studio. The producer is Mark Nevers, who's worked on most Lambchop records, and on ''Mr. M'' is as much a part of the band as anyone. Among other things, he is an intuitive wizard of reverb: he makes all sorts of tones, identifiable to a particular instrument or not, resonate and burn away as if in a very different atmosphere -- underwater, or in deep space.

Lambchop has a vestigial, almost metaphorical relationship with the sound and atmosphere of 1970s country music. Sometimes that comes closer to the surface; ''The Good Life (Is Wasted),'' one of this album's best songs, couldn't have grown out of any other tradition. Otherwise, when the strings take over, it can sound like Nelson Riddle through the looking glass, or in the case of the album's two instrumentals, ''Gar'' and ''Betty's Overture,'' incidental music for a '70s film.

This isn't a bellwether band, or one that starts controversy. It's out there on its own, without anxiety, and it's created its own space. The harder it works, the more it invests in that strange space, the better it becomes; of all its records, ''Mr. M'' sounds like its least mannered, most mysterious and probably its best. BEN RATLIFF

MATTHEW SHIPP TRIO

''Elastic Aspects''

(Thirsty Ear)

Stubbornness comes easily to the pianist Matthew Shipp, who long ago established his base camp in the rough hinterland of jazz's post-1960s avant-garde. But he isn't an inflexible stylist or the sort of artist who seems insulated from collaborative influence.

Last year, to commemorate his 50th birthday, he released an archetypal double album called ''The Art of the Improviser,'' half of which documented a performance by his working trio. (The other half was a solo recital.) He also released ''Cosmic Lieder,'' a scintillating duo album with the saxophonist Darius Jones, and ''Knives From Heaven,'' with the bassist William Parker and members of Antipop Consortium, the alternative hip-hop crew.

The diversity of those albums says as much about Mr. Shipp's restlessness as it does about his relationship with Thirsty Ear Recordings, which put out all three (and for which he serves as part-time curator).

''Elastic Aspects,'' his new release, once again features his trio with the bassist Michael Bisio and the drummer Whit Dickey. And once again it's a study in turbulent flow, with small-scale compositions that break open to enable exploration.

What sets the album apart is focus: Mr. Shipp conceived this music as a suite, and the band brings a dynamic flair to its execution. There's also the effect of a recording studio, which yields a calmer, more cloistered feeling than the trio pursues in concert. (The group plays on Tuesday and Wednesday at Jazz Standard, jazzstandard.com.)

Mr. Shipp has his jazz-piano roots, and there are moments here -- like most of ''Psychic Counterpart,'' early in the going -- that suggest a prickly triangulation of Andrew Hill, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. ''Explosive Aspects,'' an atonal exercise, suggests a more severe strain of free jazz, hammering and dense. More intriguingly, ''Stage 10'' finds Mr. Shipp engaging with nonstandard piano techniques, plucking and damping its strings by hand, while his rhythm section swings four to the bar, in an obliquely cheerful cadence.

Whether it's a matter of accumulated energies or merely an accident of design, the album perceptibly gathers steam. ''Stage 10'' kicks off its strong final stretch, which culminates in the one-two punch of ''Elastic Aspects'' and ''Elastic Eye.'' Preceding that stretch, and maybe setting it on its course, is a solo interlude by Mr. Bisio, played with a bow. It's one of the album's few suggestions of imploring emotion, which lends it a ripe and exotic air. NATE CHINEN